March 31, 2005

questions about bias

Sam Nelson at Catching Flies has an interesting question about the liberal professors study. You should read his whole post if you're interested:

OK, their data comes from a survey completed in 1999 where they find 72% of professors are "left/liberal" and only 15% "right/conservative." About 13% must be something else. They compare this to a Carnegie report from 1984 showing a 39 - 34 % split between liberals and conservatives and this is the basis for their claim that there has been a shift. Well, a shift in the ideological orientation of faculty is ONE explanation of this data, but it is not the only one. This would be a huge shift in merely 15 years, but it could just as easily be an indication that their 1999 data is seriously flawed and their results atypical. What happened in those 15 years to explain a shift like they suggest? While there was significant replacement in most faculties during the period 1984 to 1999, a lot of the people who were around in 1984 were still on faculties in 1999. Did they suddenly become liberal, or did only conservatives retire? A change this large has to be explored and a variety of explanations considered before we can draw the kinds of conclusions Rothman et al draw.

In other words, there's more than one explanation for the difference between the 1984 data and the 1999 data. The authors of the study need to address that.

Heather will have more to say about the whole study later.

If you're really interested, you should go read the article at Inside Higher Ed and the comments on the article. They present a very interesting discussion.

Comments

Accompanying the alleged leftward shift of the university in the last 15 years is an equally clear phenomenon: conservatives' rejection of anything resembling academic empiricism or respect for truth. We used to have debates with conservatives, on real issues, with real disagreements on the interpretation of a shared body of empirical facts. That hardly ever happens any more. Conservative thinktanks have jettisoned real thinkers and replaced them with talking-points-repeating-op-ed-writing partisan hack liars. Formerly respectable conservative thinkers (I'm thinking of people like Thomas Sowell) have turned into caricatures of their former selves, transforming like butterflies back into caterpillars and becoming flacks for Dear Leader and apologists for unserious scholars like Michelle Malkin. Sure, there are still a handful of exceptions, but compare Richard Pipes with Daniel Pipes and my point is clear. They don't care about the truth any more. My question: are these two phenomena related? If so, which is cause and which is effect?